Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 5 · column 4 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
troubling. “Hey, man, surf’s up!” says it all.
Even after nearly a decade, Southern California was still a foreign country to me. There are no two ways about it: there, I would always be a square peg in a round hole. It was time to come home to the East.
Coincidentally, it was actually drizzling on the day the movers packed up our belongings in Oceanside — as if the gods were trying to lure me back — but it was too little, too late. I wasn’t having any of it, and drove away without so much as a backward glance.
The following week as my family and I settled into our new home in Amissville, rain greeted our arrival, as well. The movers were tracking red Virginia clay onto my kitchen floor, but it didn’t matter. It was real rain this time!
Coyotes had trespassed on our landscaped, automaticsprinklered, postage stampsized California backyard. In Virginia, deer, foxes, squirrels and rabbits have free run of our two wooded acres. Dogwood and redbud trees are populated with cardinals and bluebirds. The transition was akin to moving from onedimension to three, and black and white to Technicolor.
During our early days in northern Virginia, I was a fulltime mother and homemaker. A rural environment seemed the ideal place to raise children, and so it is. There is no need for an air quality index here; smog isn’t even part of the vocabulary.
Quaint country stores dot the landscape, reminding me of the little neighborhood stores on almost every residential corner in the small Pennsylvania town where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s.
Back then we carefully selected penny candy and popsicles before counting out our nickels and dimes. How wonderful that, even in 1997, there exists in Rappahannock
96.6%